Professor Charles Corbett and Felipe Caro
Social and environmental aspects of firms’ global supply chains are increasingly being recognized as key considerations to take into account when making business decisions. Some measures are relatively well-defined by now, such as carbon footprinting. Social considerations are more recently gaining increasing attention, in particular in the technology supply chain. Firms in the technology sector are constantly making decisions that have economic, environmental and social dimensions, and hence they are, explicitly or implicitly, trading off fundamentally different economic, environmental and social measures. The purpose of this project is to interview key stakeholders within technology firms, to better understand how they do this.
Professor Charles Corbett and Guillaume Roels
This research project aims at developing a protocol for conducting Operations Audits of technology startups. Whether they are engaged in (outsourced) manufacturing, software (app) development or delivering software-as-a-service, or otherwise, all startups do have a variety of operational processes in place. The purpose of an operations audit protocol would be, for instance, for a potential investor to be able to determine the operational strengths and weaknesses of a startup within a few hours, by following a structured approach.
Professor Magali Delmas
We propose to study incentives for technology adoption in the commercial buildings sector. This study will evaluate the performance outcomes related to the adoption of energy efficient technologies, such as reduced energy consumption and investor performance, in terms of rent price premiums, occupancy rates and energy savings. Using a unique dataset constituting of 178,777 buildings in the City of Los Angeles, this research will also evaluate how different financing models can alleviate split incentives problems, a well-known barrier to the adoption of energy efficient technologies.
Professor Marvin Lieberman
The topic of disruptive innovation has received enormous attention in recent years. Although Clayton Christensen's ideas have been highly influential, they have increasingly been subject to critiques, and it seems clear that disruptive innovation is unlikely to be a single phenomenon. The purpose of this study is to develop a categorization and assessment of various types of disruption, including "low end" entry by initially inferior products (emphasized by Christensen), "high-end" entry, business model disruption, and platform envelopment.
Professor Reza Ahmadi
We propose that sellers can influence buyer behavior through the structure of Contract |i.e., a fixed- or renegotiable-price contract - and we support this by empirical analysis. Using a two-period, game-theoretic model, we find that (1) contract structure can affect the pace of adoption in different ways, and (2) the optimal contract choice depends on the strength of externality, the strength of seller competition, buyer bargaining power, and the size of buyer group.
Professor Nico Voigtlander
The project examines the role of cities for international trade and firm productivity. It provides a model with agglomeration effects that drive the sorting of firms into cities of different sizes, depending on firm productivity draws. The model makes predictions about the joint determination of the location of economic activity (economic geography) and the patterns of trade flows. In particular, larger cities have a disproportionate importance for country-level exports. Empirically, we use a large panel covering more than 200,000 Chinese manufacturing firms to test the predictions of the theory.
Professor John Ullmen
Leaders in technology-based organizations often rise to a point in the management ranks on the strength of their technical acumen, but fall short when it comes to the ability to inspire confidence, collaboration and commitment in others. As a result, senior leadership positions often go to people who lack technical acumen, which can limit career growth for people with technical backgrounds, and present challenges to their organizations. This research project focuses on how technical leaders can develop executive presence more quickly and successfully. In this first phase of the research, we conduct in-depth interviews and administer both quantitative and qualitative assessments with relevant stakeholders with a population of technical leaders in a prominent global technology organization, analyze the data, and present the findings.